Category Archives: Uncategorized

My mum died ten years ago. It was the quietest of deaths – a pulse stopping at the end of years of exile in a dark, silent place so far removed from the places of laughter that she had shared … Continue reading →

St Enogat is a small, pretty town just a few miles from Dinard on Brittany’s Côte d’Émeraude. One quiet Sunday I sat in the shade of a persimmon tree and watched two elderly men preparing to play pétanque on an … Continue reading →

I have a sleep disorder that – compounded currently by the side effects of medication – ensures that each and every night is fragmented into a sort of archipelago of the  5 stages of slumber varying from just stages 1 … Continue reading →

If I have ever adhered to any kind of faith it’s been to a belief based on hope against rational expectation that the capacity for redemption and salvation is a product of obdurate human desire and will alone. Once upon … Continue reading →

  JACQUES PRÉVERT – 1900 : 1977 For a poet – for any kind of writer – English is a seductive language.  With a vocabulary that is rich in synonyms way beyond reasonable need, wrapped up in a mind-boggling and … Continue reading →

FIRST TRAIN TO SKAVILLE..! The enduring presence of old-school ska and the various revivalist outbreaks that occurred on both sides of the Atlantic alongside the ever-developing forms and sub-sets of its descendant genre reggae is a mighty tribute to the … Continue reading →

It was jazz that finally provided a soundtrack to my nascent sense of rebellion. And it was understanding jazz that finally gave me a sense of the world as a place in which I too might step outside the four-square … Continue reading →

Another attempt at disentanglement from Facebook. Tacit collusion with Zuckerberg hypocrisy and the overall cynicism at the heart of the Facebook process is the larger context and a growing disillusionment with my self-created role as the well-patronised  curator of a … Continue reading →

At age 16 I fell in love with the Beats. It was a passion that, for a while, consumed me entirely. Its heat immolated in a single brief firestorm and its light eclipsed in a single flash all that, for … Continue reading →

THERE IS A COURTYARD There is a courtyard in between sleep and awake and within its walls the light is different and the darkness unfamiliar. And whilst slowly crossing its uneven cobbles, surprised at where you are, voices may call … Continue reading →